A prominent leader of the Tea Party movement recently said he was working to unseat Minnesota Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison in part because he is a Muslim. Judson Phillips, the founder of the Tea Party Nation, urged Minnesota voters to elect Ellison’s independent challenger, Lynn Torgerson, on Tuesday. "A majority of Tea Party members, I suspect, are not fans of Islam," Phillips said. Rep. Ellison, the first Muslim congressman,...

This week marks the beginning of a trial for fourteen antiwar activists who held a ten-day vigil outside the Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada last year. The base is one of several homes of the American military’s aerial drone program in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The activists were charged with criminal trespassing for entering the base with a letter describing their opposition to the drone program. [includes rush...

We speak with David Leigh, the investigations editor at The Guardian, one of the three newspapers, along with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks gave the Afghanistan war documents to. "Broadly, we see a similar picture in the three media. What we do see is quite a different political perspective. From the New York Times’s point of view...it was interesting to see that the relationship with Pakistan was a political...

In Pakistan, where the undeclared US war continues to expand, armed fighters attacked a convoy carrying military vehicles for NATO forces in Afghanistan, torching fifty trucks, killing seven, and injuring another seven. Last week, a senior United Nations official formally asked the Obama administration to halt or scale back CIA drone strikes on alleged militant suspects in Pakistan. For a perspective on what US policy toward Afghanistan and...

The Obama administration has publicly defended the legality of drone attacks for the first time. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh said last week the use of drones in the fight against al-Qaeda was both legal and necessary. Koh’s comments come six months after Philip Alston, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, said that the strikes "might violate international...

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. "I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism," Nairn says. "But once he became president...Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans...

Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine revealed last week that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first nine-and-a-half months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan — a rate of approximately one bombing a week. We speak to one of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program: Philip Alston, the UN...

We’re joined from the Indian capital of New Delhi by the Booker Prize-winning novelist, political essayist and global justice activist Arundhati Roy. Her books include the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things and her latest essay collection, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. We speak to Roy about India’s conflict with Maoist rebels, the occupation of Kashmir, ongoing Indian-Pakistani tensions,...

Andrew Exum is a former Army captain who has been openly critical of the drone attacks inside Pakistan. Exum served on active duty in the US Army from 2000 until 2004, including two years leading a platoon of Army Rangers inside Iraq and Afghanistan. He recently returned from two months in Afghanistan, where he served as part of the advisory team of the commander of US troops there, General Stanley McChrystal. [includes rush transcript]

The US drone attacks inside Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq have received bipartisan support in Washington. And when the CIA disclosed the existence of an aborted secret assassination program last month, congressional outrage centered around the fact that lawmakers weren’t properly informed. The open acceptance of assassination as a tool of US policy can in part be explained by the fact it’s been going on for decades. [includes rush...

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